Basically is says “life is hard. Christians shouldn’t be all happy clappy. Good Friday is about empathy.
It’s there that we relate to the Jesus of Good Friday.
And so today I wrestle with my own atheism, my own hopelessness, and my own pain. And that’s the most Christian thing I can imagine to do.
Hmmm.
Good Friday and Jesus on Good Friday are more complex than that.
- Jesus is clearly both victim and man on a mission
- Confession for complicity and failure are big in the story
- Good Friday is also about victory over sin and death and atonement
- There is almost zero empathy in the story itself. You have a betrayer, a forsaker, cowards and mockers. Jesus in the middle doesn’t say “feel sorry for me” he says “women of Jerusalem lament for yourselves.”
This is the main weakness of progressive evangelicalism. If evangelicalism is in danger of becoming a facile sin-forgiveness mechanism this is in danger of becoming a shill for contemporary liberal optimism.
Empathy is important, but only one item in a much larger narrative. Good Friday is bigger than “Jesus paid our debt” but it’s also bigger than “empathy”.
